Ainslie announced his retirement from Olympic sailing on Tuesday in The Daily Telegraph and will now pursue full-time his aim of winning the America’s Cup for Britain.

“Ben is very focused on his sport, for him it’s not about being a celebrity, and that has to be admired,” said Hoy, one of two British Olympians who have topped Ainslie’s record of four gold medals. Sir Steve Redgrave is the other.

“It’s quite refreshing in the current era when everybody seems desperate to build a profile. At the end of the day it’s about winning medals and being successful and Ben has certainly done that. There is a lot of respect and admiration for him within the sporting world.

“Ben is an icon in British Olympic history having won his four golds and silver in individual events. He handles himself well and is a great ambassador for his sport and Britain as well.”

Hoy, speaking at the launch of his new range of bikes, also strongly supported Dave Brailsford’s zero tolerance on past doping offenders at Team Sky introduced in the wake of the Lance Armstrong affair.

“I am 100 per cent behind what Sky are doing and I find it frustrating that one of the few teams that are really trying to change the sport for the better is the one that is coming under such scrutiny,” said Hoy.

“The Team Sky approach is the right approach and it’s the same as the BOA [British Olympic Association] and their Olympic bylaw earlier this year [whereby an athlete with a previous drugs ban was excluded from the Olympics]. To me they are parallel cases.

“Instead of people penalising GB and the BOA for their approach, should the rest of the world not be following the BOA approach? We should always be looking for deterrents. You can’t be relying on people’s moral compasses, you have to have something to stop them doing it.”

Hoy flies to Perth on Monday for a three-week training block with the Great Britain track squad before testing his fitness at the Rotterdam six-day event in January, as he decides whether to continue racing through to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, when the track cycling events will be held in the Sir Chris Hoy velodrome.